Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever was born in Russia (then part of the Soviet Union), grew up in Israel and moved to Canada as a teenager. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 2005, and then a master's and a PhD in computer science from the same university. His PhD supervisor was Geoffrey Hinton. He was part of DNNResearch, a company set up by Hinton's research group, and after Google acquired it he worked as a research scientist at Google Brain. In 2015 he co-founded OpenAI. As of October 2026, he is co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of the AI company Safe Superintelligence (SSI).

In 2012 Sutskever built AlexNet, a convolutional neural network, with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky. AlexNet identified objects in a large image database far more accurately than other methods of the time. In 2014, with his Google colleagues Oriol Vinyals and Quoc V. Le, he published the 'sequence to sequence' learning method. In this method one neural network turns a sentence into a set of numbers and another network produces a new sentence from those numbers; it was tested on translating English into French. At OpenAI he served as research director and later as chief scientist, and took part in developing the GPT models.

Sutskever left OpenAI in May 2024 and in June that year founded SSI with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. SSI started with offices in Palo Alto in the United States and Tel Aviv in Israel, and described its aim as 'one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence'. Superintelligence means AI with abilities beyond those of humans. After Gross left the company at the end of June 2025, Sutskever became CEO in July. As of July 2026 SSI had not released any commercial products and was focusing on research, and that month it announced a long-term partnership with NVIDIA. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in the UK in 2022 and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto in 2025.